Good Saturday morning! I've done my rankings for the Writer's Toolbox, since I finished using the devices in there this week. Overall, it's fair to middling - the Shiny ranking is not great.
Part of what knocked down the Shiny ranking is the quality of the pieces. The sticks are an awkward size and shape, and the way they're held in the box makes it difficult to pull them out and put them away after use. I felt like it would be easier to have some kind of work-around, rather than using them as provided, like a cup or a bag to shuffle them up and then another bag or clip to hold them together afterwards. Also, the content of the sticks got a little...strange, at times.
Similarly, the dials for the Protagonist Game feel a little flimsy. The part that spins on them is a thick paper, it feels like, and it seems like it would be easy to tear or bend it. As I show in the videos I used it, it's also very easy to end up on the same result multiple times - I don't think there are many options on each wheel, so the reuse value is questionable.
They were fun to use, though as one of my friends commented, the overall box definitely skews toward contemporary fiction (as opposed to historical or speculative fiction). I tend to prefer things that either lean in a more speculative direction, or don't have a strong bias in any direction, so it doesn't feel like it's pushing me down a particular path.
Now, onto today's story! I used the StoryADay website prompt from May 15 for this, because it sparked something right away:
Write a single or series of journal entries in first person where your character is exploring something in a set time period – hours in the day, a week, a few years. The entries must end on a note where she/he/they find out or realize that things have never been what they seemed.
April 7, 2019, morning
I start the new job today! It’s been a while since I’ve been the new kid - I had my last job for so long, I felt like I had helped hire half the people I worked with. Still, it’ll be good to get started in a completely new space. Going from a big company to a little non-profit is probably going to be a bit of a culture shock, but I think it could be good to have a clear shift in my work life. Things ended so badly at the last place, I need something that’s so different from that experience. Still, I’m nervous. I hate coming into a new space where everyone knows what they’re doing and has been in place for a while, and then I come in and they have to make space for me. It reminds me of being the new kid at school, and that was never easy. I just wish adulthood was less like high school than it is - I could have sworn I had teachers who told me that the high school stuff ended when you graduate, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Time to see what the new place holds! I’m still not entirely sure what the organization does, but I’m sure I’ll have some time to do more research once I’m there and have something solid to grab onto.
Evening:
OK, that was…different. The people seemed pretty nice, though I think the bookkeeper doesn’t like me for some reason. I’m not sure what I did to irritate her, but I’m going to have to keep an eye out on that relationship.
My new boss showed me around, then dropped me at a desk and told me that I’d be hearing from my “other boss” shortly. I remembered that, at the interview, they had said that I would be working for two different teams in this role (which is a brand new role that’s never been filled before, so I guess I’m going to be creating it for myself), but I hadn’t realized that I was going to literally have two bosses. That doesn’t feel great, and I’m going to have to talk to them to figure out who does what in terms of the basic HR stuff. Then again, I don’t think there is an HR department here - it’s a really small place, so I guess they figure they can handle things as they come up? That might get awkward when I have to ask for accommodations, but I can already tell that the place where my desk is is going to trigger my headaches pretty badly unless I do something about the lights.
I’m in a big team room with two other people, both of whom seemed pretty busy with their own work and didn’t have much time to talk to me. They did have time to complain about the people they work with, though - I got to hear a lot of stuff about people I really hope I don’t have to work with myself, because again, awkward. I’m not used to that much negativity right out of the gate, but we’ll see. Maybe they were just having a bad day.
I didn’t hear from my other boss until I was almost ready to leave, and she called - I guess she doesn’t work in the office itself? Anyway, she’s going to meet me at the office tomorrow and we’re going to go over some more details of what my work supporting her will be, and then I’ll try to set up a similar meeting with the boss in the office to get some details. I hate having the ambiguity, so the sooner I can get things hammered down, the better I’ll feel.
Since no one seemed to know what to do with me, I spent most of the day reading through some of the documents and information related to the organization. There’s a book that apparently regulates how everything is supposed to happen, and it’s dense, and written in some kind of pseudo-legalese, which is annoying - it’s like they’re trying to make it sound “important” without understanding how to use that language correctly. There are terms in there that I haven’t been able to find definitions for - something about a “great lizard” keeps coming up, and how they’re eligible to work in the schools, but that makes it sound like there’s a dragon in charge of the universities, and that’s obviously not the case. For one, dragons aren’t real, and for two, I don’t really think they’d be interested in running a school. Who knows, though? Maybe there are dragons up in the ivory tower. (The book keeps talking about an ivory tower, too, like it’s a real thing and not a metaphor. I swear, whoever wrote this thing would have benefitted from a writing course or two.)
Either way, tomorrow I meet my other boss, and hopefully I’ll get some more details on what exactly I’m supposed to do. I know it’s going to involve a lot of paperwork, and I’ve already taken a look at some of the files - oof. They definitely need some help. Fortunately, my inner librarian is very ready to set up some organizational systems and beat the paperwork into submission. This is going to be fun, I think.
April 8, evening
So that was unexpected. My other boss is one of the leaders of the school of theology, which is one of the schools under this university umbrella (I still haven’t figured out the whole structure, and no one’s given me a clear organizational chart yet), and yeah, she’s a dragon. She’s a dragon. I think if I keep saying it, it might sink in, but I don’t think it’s working. She’s a dragon, and she lives in the ivory tower. There’s a literal ivory tower on the main campus, which I didn’t see, because my office isn’t on the main campus, and she’s a DRAGON.
Dragons don’t look like I expected them to. At least, she doesn’t look like what I expected a dragon to look like. I didn’t even realize it right away, until I noticed that her eyes were different. She has those slits for pupils that lizards have, and her eyes blink sideways, and once I noticed that, I couldn’t not notice the fine line of scales along her hairline, but they’re the same color as her hair, so they blend in a little, except they catch the light and glitter just a little bit, and I guess I was staring, because she started to laugh and asked me if I’d never met a dragon before. So, yeah. My boss is a dragon. Well, one of them is. She gave me some more information, that I’m still trying to absorb, and there are only a few dragons that work at the university, and they’re all the heads of the individual schools - she almost made it sound like upon becoming the head of the school, a person BECOMES a dragon? I don’t know. I just know that there are only a few of them, and they aren’t, like, fire-breathing, people-eating monsters (though she did tell me to keep an eye out for the head of the agricultural school, but that might be because he’s a creep more than because he’s a people-eater).
I work for a dragon. I left the corporate world, where everyone says it’s full of snakes, and now I’m working for a DRAGON.
Cool.
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